Their gatherings take place at locations as disparate as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan or the Bohemian Hall and Beer Garden in Queens, but they always reflect their consummate knowledge of New York. And when the conversation turns to topics like chaos or history’s turning points, no one is in a hurry to go home.

In fact, there is often a waitlist to get in.

Meet New York City’s archivists.

Archivists are the specialists who snatch objects from oblivion. They have long spent their careers cloistered, like the objects they protected. But now many of these professionals are stepping out. A main reason is the Archivists Round Table of Metropolitan New York. The group, which recently surpassed 500 members, holds monthly events that draw a young, well-dressed crowd, hungry for chances to network, train and socialize. Members not only work at libraries, where archives have long resided, but also at such organizations as the Fashion Institute of Technology, the Junior League, the Episcopal Church, the Philharmonic, the Stock Exchange and the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

Michael Simonson, 44, is the archivist at the Leo Baeck Institute in Manhattan, a research library on German Jewry. His responsibilities include preserving for posterity two dainty teacups and saucers that bear photogravure likenesses of little Albert Einstein and his sister, Maya, and which came from the family’s home. After hours, Mr. Simonson, in his thick-rimmed hipster glasses, has also taken a turn as president of the Round Table, coming away with a keen awareness of other treasures salted away at leading institutions around New York and of the kindred souls who protect them.

Maurita Baldock, one longtime member, jaunty in red-tinged glasses and an asymmetrical haircut, keeps watch by day over records that document American history as the curator of manuscripts at the New-York Historical Society. Included among them is a frank letter that Gen. George Washington wrote in 1782, before stretch jeans hit the scene. In it, he begs his tailor to make his britches “roomy in the seat and not tight in the thigh.”

Annemarie van Roessel, the reference archivist for the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, has Katharine Hepburn’s diaries at her fingertips and 80 boxes of material devoted to Gypsy Rose Lee that leave little to the imagination. That includes see-through panties, with an Air Force unit’s logo, from a U.S.O. mission to Asia in 1969, and most revealing of all: the performer’s tax returns.

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Annemarie van Roessel is a reference archivist at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.Credit
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Archivists, of course, cannot always spill. Maria LaCalle, who came to a Round Table lecture on Google wearing a jeweled nose stud and the kind of toned biceps that come from hoisting 40-pound boxes all day, still will not breathe a word about the archive she managed years ago for Rolling Stone magazine on the rock ’n’ roll era. (Nor would anyone at the magazine’s head office broach the subject.)

“You say you’re an archivist, and no one knows what you do,” said Rachel Chatalbash, the Round Table’s current president. Recently named senior archivist at the Yale Center for British Art, she previously worked at the Guggenheim Museum.

Strictly speaking, archivists should not be confused with librarians, who generally manage collections meant to be handled freely; with record managers, who keep track of items created in the course of business; or with conservationists, who restore and preserve old objects.

Archivists, rather, gather essential items with an eye to the future, and their work, done properly, becomes “a porthole into the past,” Ms. van Roessel said.

They may, however, impose more restrictions than librarians if assets are irreplaceable or precious — asking patrons to wear gloves, for instance.

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Maurita Baldock is an archivist at the New-York Historical Society.Credit
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

“Is there a temptation to guard the item and not allow access because it might fall apart?” asked Vanessa Cameron, a former archivist for the Bronx County Historical Society, now working at a private club. “Yes. Preservation and access are going to butt up against each other all the time.”

Digitizing has made it easier to provide facsimiles of items, like books, to avoid some wear and tear from handling. But at times there is no substitute, given the information and aura that surround an object.

“I’m a big proponent of access,” said Mr. Simonson, fearful that he will now be bombarded with requests from people wanting to join him for tea. “But people would have to justify why they have to see an actual item that could be culturally valuable.”

To succeed, archivists say they must be savvy about the ever-shifting technical, legal and commercial terrain, so they know what to keep, how to share what they have and how to guard against poachers and other threats. Knowledge of chemistry, art and history come in handy, as do foreign languages, ancient and modern. (Ms. Cameron jokes that besides French, she speaks Bronx.)

With institutions, businesses and people constantly creating records that need to be organized or culled, there is no shortage of work. When money is tight, projects may last only as long as the grants that finance them, making some archivists vagabonds.

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The archives at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts have panties from a U.S.O. tour by Gypsy Rose Lee.Credit
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Job postings also make clear that applicants must be able to climb ladders and carry heavy boxes. “That’s so much more important than people think,” Mr. Simonson said. “If one can’t do that, then you’re relying on everyone else.”

The most commonly used boxes weigh 40 pounds when full, according to Ms. Chatalbash.

“Fifty, counting the dust,” said Ryan Anthony Donaldson, an archivist for the Durst Organization.

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A national group known as the Society of American Archivists has existed for over 75 years. In New York, though, the action revolves around the Round Table, which runs lectures, tours, workshops, socials and happy hours.

Founded in 1979, the organization has taken off in the last decade, with archivists seeing the need to update their skills and realizing that for the good of their collections, they had to come out of their “room of dusty papers,” as Mr. Simonson put it, to engage more with the public and one another.

Round Table classes, despite titles like Project Strategies for Processing Event Documentation or Archives and Activism, fill quickly. A tour of Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn for 40 people had 50 on the waitlist. A trip to Woody Guthrie’s archives had so many takers that the waitlist was closed.

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The collection of the New-York Historical Society includes George Washington's army cot, as well as a letter he wrote to his tailor.Credit
New York Historical Society

Spend time at their gatherings and archivists are quick to confess that theirs was an accidental calling, often discovered en route to becoming a professor or historian. They also appreciate that aside from those who land corporate posts, few among them will ever get rich — not counting the psychic income that comes from being in the know.

For those who prefer their history laced with boldface names, the New York Public Library has devoted an entire building in Lincoln Center to the performing arts. Archivists there are constantly weighing how to shape artifacts and records of the messy, over-the-top lives of movie stars and other celebrities, while vetting new acquisitions that come their way.

Gone, for instance, is an urn filled with ashes that archivists returned to the donor who pressed it upon the library.

Round Table members who work for New York’s Municipal Archives have other types of buried gold at their fingertips. They can examine the original deed for Coney Island, or the bill that a New York doctor submitted for his services as the public whipper in 1792, or the marriage license that New York issued Meyer Lansky in 1929.

The 26-year-old groom, remembered today as a gangster, listed his occupation as “auto rental” and had his associate “Ben Siegel,” better known as Bugsy, sign as a witness.

As digitizing coaxes more of these bits of history out of the shadows, Ms. Chatalbash does not seem worried that her profession will become obsolete. Digital copies may abound, but archivists will still be in control of the magic thing itself. Or as she said confidently, “I will have the original.”

A version of this article appears in print on April 29, 2013, on Page A14 of the New York edition with the headline: Leaving Cloister Of Dusty Offices, Young Archivists Find Like Minds. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe